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All the finest playwrights broaden the frontiers of drama. Playwrights like Beckett and Pinter achieved this in their unique fashion. The achievement of Tom Stoppard was to take seemingly obscure subjects – from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the puzzle of consciousness – and convert them into clever, creative and frequently touching plays. The stage, Laurence Olivier noted, is a great glamorizer of intellect. Stoppard affirmed that with his talent to make ideas dance.

Early Encounter

Fortunately for me to encounter Stoppard in his early career. That was completely thanks to Philip French, who, aside from being a movie reviewer, was also a British Broadcasting Corporation producer. In 1966 he asked me to deliver a short talk on two radio plays by a then unknown writer referred to as Tom Stoppard. In Dominic Boot's Dissolution, an impoverished writer accumulated an constantly rising taxi bill. And in If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, a bus operator tried to get in touch with his wife who was the time announcement service. I was struck by the ingenuity of both plays and had the chance to meet their young author.

It speaks volumes for Stoppard’s grace of spirit that even after I had been on television in 1968 and given a sniffy first-night review of The Real Inspector Hound – which I today adore – he remained impeccably polite. But one thing people neglect about Stoppard is that, as an former journalist himself, he grasped the ways of the journalistic world.

Cerebral Virtuoso and Heartfelt Depth

From the start, Stoppard was celebrated as an mental athlete: a man who was motivated by concepts as much as by character and plot. But, just as we eventually came to realise that Pinter was invariably a political playwright, so we eventually came to see that there was an emotional undertow to Stoppard’s cerebral concepts. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead was commended for its brilliance in crafting a drama out of two peripheral characters from Hamlet, but seeing it again suggest that it is about how we are all prey of arbitrary circumstances leading to our extinction. I remember John Wood, who had portrayed Guildenstern on Broadway and who became an quintessential Stoppard actor, remarking, “In Tom’s plays, the dialogue is all. The word is beating back the silence, pushing back the darkness … I think this is what makes his plays so emotional and even sorrowful.”

The characteristic blend of conceptual boldness and feeling was also present in Stoppard’s 1972 hit, Jumpers. This, ultimately, was a play that asked a significant philosophical question: whether social morality was a learned behavior to history or whether ethical rules adhered to an universal, divinely inspired law. Not your average subject for a play, but here the topic of a lecture being prepared by the play’s hero, George Moore. But the more one experienced the play, the more one understood that it was also about the suffering of a failing marriage and the risks of a collapsing society in which astronauts were fighting on the moon and a previous agriculture minister had been made archbishop of Canterbury.

Meticulous Research and Affecting Breakthrough

Stoppard’s accomplishment – one he had in common with playwright Michael Frayn – was to show that theatregoers were receptive to plays about sophisticated ideas. His work was also carefully researched. I remember, just before Jumpers, encountering him on the stairs of the a library in London where he was holding a pile of books that came up to his chin. “What is that?” I asked. “My next play,” he replied.

With time, the feeling of his plays became more and more apparent. The key moment arguably came with Real Thing (1982) which stands up better than the majority of his plays to restaging. It asks a plethora of queries such as whether any social obligation is the outcome of personal instability and whether notions such as fairness and national pride exist independent of our perceptions of them. But behind this – and what makes the play so relevant – is a acute consciousness of the joy of love and the pain of betrayal.

Even Arcadia (1993), which addresses fatalism and free will, classicism and the Romantic movement, and a myriad of other things, functions because it is intensely moving. Ideas and feeling seamlessly come together in a segment where a exceptional youth, Thomasina, bemoans the disappearance of past cultures to which her tutor replies: “Mathematical discoveries caught sight of and overlooked will have their moment.” And that is precisely what occurs, in that Thomasina’s innovative reinterpretation of the Newtonian universe survives her unfortunately abbreviated life.

Questioning the Efficacy of Art

Stoppard’s genius as a dramatist was seldom questioned. What was discussed, especially in the early years, were his reservations about the effectiveness of theatre: something he frequently explored in conversations. “I used to feel isolated,” he said in 1976, “because when I started to write, you were a bad person if you weren’t writing about Vietnam or housing. Now I have no hesitation about that. To avert indirectly to Travesties [his 1974 play], The Importance of Being Earnest is meaningful but it avoids serious topics.”

I believe he was completely wrong about that since the play by Wilde presents a ongoing observation on finance, wedlock, morals, social class, the decline of the aristocracy and the dominance of commerce. But Stoppard contradicted his own point by writing a series of works that grapple to great effect with the abuse of individual freedoms by authoritarian governments. One of the most remarkable was Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, first presented at the Festival Hall in 1977. It portrayed a Russian dissident falsely diagnosed mad and locked in a cell with an authentic madman who believes himself in command of an orchestra. It was astonishing both to see the whole London Symphony Orchestra on stage and to observe Stoppard revealing the brutal illogicalities of communist repression with dark humour. As I noted at the time, “brutality is met with sarcasm and rigidity with a